Recently, I shared a<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/marketridebbieandrews_now-hiring-one-marketing-person-to-do-the-share-7482392937931255808-TbiN/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAAdw94BxKhoZCKxVqAOLX61d8AGqGOdgDQ” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>mock job advertisement on LinkedIn. It stated that one hired marketer should also take charge of duties like branding strategist, data analyst, martech expert, creative team leader and AI operations expert. The pay? The work required only one salary and no more. It was satire, though it shouldn’t have needed to be.
The post drew a wave of comments. What got my attention was who left comments. They were CMOs, in-house marketing directors a decade into their career and content strategists who could quote their own job description back at me almost line for line.
That reaction confirmed what I’ve seen countless times over the last three decades. The solo marketer model isn’t a stopgap. It’s the default operating assumption at most mid-market companies and it’s structurally broken.
Why this keeps happening
Two things are going on here, and they aren’t a failure of the marketer.
First, most leadership teams don’t know what it takes to build a marketing team. They know it in theory but not in practice. They need to know what it takes to build a marketing function for $5 million in revenue versus $50 million. They need to know which skills are important at different stages of growth, and how to allocate budget across an activity that includes everything from brand to data to technology to content to an increasing amount of AI workflow. Most executives know marketing as a single, one-off activity.
Second, building a marketing team is treated as necessary but unfunded. Every company knows it has to hire “the marketing person” but very few know what that person needs to make their job easier. This is how the marketing function gets overloaded with responsibilities and robbed of resources and then blamed for not giving the results fast enough.
Data backs this up
This isn’t anecdotal.Content Marketing Institute’s 2026 Career and Salary Outlookfound that 76% of marketers are now doing the work of more than one job. The research coined it as a “ghost workforce,” meaning people are absorbing two or three roles’ worth of output without the title, headcount, or compensation to match. It reflects exactly what those hundreds of comments were telling me.
What this costs
I’ve witnessed this same hire happen across dozens of engagements: one experienced generalist, asked to run brand, content, demand gen and reporting all at once. It usually looks fine for the first six months, because the person is good and willing to stretch beyond what the role should reasonably ask of them.
Then something slips, usually reporting first, then campaign consistency, and the marketer starts absorbing blame for gaps no single person was ever going to cover alone. Most are gone within a year, and the company ends up rehiring, minus the institutional knowledge that walked out the door with them, often with a brand that looks less consistent than before they made the hire in the first place.
Call that a hiring mistake if you want. What I actually see is a structural failure dressed up as a personnel problem. You can’t buy department-level output for the price of one generalist’s salary.
What companies should do instead
Laid out bluntly, the solution is treating marketing as a function to be designed.
It’s important to begin with the plan and not the position description. Prior to creating the job description, think about which specific objectives are most relevant right now: brand identity, marketing funnel, retention or perhaps even a mix of them all. The responses to this will dictate what expertise is necessary from marketing hires.
Align the organization structure with the business stage. For example, in the early stages of startup development, one generalist should be supported by specialized professionals working on the one or two tasks that are most important at this point. At the same time, established companies usually hire specialists who work under one shared strategy, rather than one generalist switching hats six times a day.
Allocate a budget for the entire operating system rather than just salary. That is, if the plan includes creating content, buying ads, collecting data and using marketing tools to make a strategy effective, make sure the budget for making the system work is properly in place.
Structure outweighs headcount
Solving this means building a marketing team around the business’ needs, sized appropriately, with someone senior enough to decide where the budget goes. It isn’t adding another headcount line.
The comments under my post weren’t venting. They were people describing the same structural failure. When that many people independently flag the same pattern, it’s no longer an anecdote. It’s a structural problem every CEO should reckon with before the next job posting goes out.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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